Coca-Colonisation

..
but realised that he is a New Zealander so the sunburnt country will have to
make do with Clive Palmer.
Tentatively I might say that we have better gun laws but the similarities between
the two countries are far greater than any differences. While we don’t
have a George Bush in the closet we do have an Abbott as our representative
intellectual giant; and I could never see us electing an Obama equivalent here.

We certainly have enough evangelical nutcases, an alarming number seeming to
have achieved seats in parliament. We have our own equivalent of the far right
of Genghis Khan Tea Party via the influential lobby group the Institute of Public
Affairs which has amongst its donors Monsanto and various mining groups. We
certainly have fast food aplenty, Coke, in both liquid and powder form, and
an appetite for other various substances of abuse. Tentatively I might say that
have better gun laws but a dyspeptic person as I myself might say that we are
just as fat, foolish and ill-educated. Whilst they have a race problem we still
manage oppress, dispossess and denigrate the aboriginal population of this country
in a manner worthy of South Africa at the height of the Apartheid era.
We are a smaller Tweedledum to their much largish Tweedledee.
Any diatribe against America sounds suspiciously like the Monty Python “What
have the Romans ever done for us” speech from “The Life of Brian”
that ends with Reg saying “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the
medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system,
and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? And Xerxes replying
“Brought peace.” Which was pretty true after WWII when America saved
the world’s bacon and made a lot of money out of it.
Since the WWII the two countries have grown increasingly alike – or rather Australia
has drifted culturally across the Pacific and is now moored somewhere near the
coast of California. Now I actually admire a lot about the USA, its perpetual
sense of optimism that the future is there to invent, a generally marvellous
Constitution based on principles, self-evident truths, that underpin a robust
democracy, and an apparent ability for all its citizens to speak in complete
sentences without pause, hesitation or embarrassment. They may not speak sense
but they say it well.
What we have had, up until recently, was a better sense of fair play. Of at
least trying to ensure that those who are disadvantaged by circumstance had
an opportunity to bootstrap themselves out of their situation. The Americans
have had a paradox of a Calvinistic streak of God’s judgment against the
poor balanced against a Pollyanna piety that anybody can be President. Of course
you can be if you have several million dollars at your disposal. That’s
a lot of food stamps, partner. America may have more of the best universities
in the world but you had a far better chance, until the last budget, of a good
education in Australia without needing to win Tattslotto or putting yourself
and your family into debt until the Last Post rang across the Parade Ground
of life.
Whilst America may be brashly over-confident and assert that it is self-evident
that the rest of the world needs to follow their values, Australia still limps
around looking for a big brother to emulate. Roughly weaned from the rapidly
shrinking bosom of the Mother Country, England, and left with an enormous and
resource rich continent to rattle around the fringes of, we run around the playground
looking for people whose gang we can belong to. Rather than establish a singular
and unique identity Australia seems to faff around with the second-hand political
detritus and outlandish ideas of other cultures. We are not America any more
than we are Great Britain. But America seems unusually attractive again at the
moment to the two major right-of-centre political parties here for some reason
seeing themselves as equivalents of the Democrat and Republican parties.
In both countries the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer and the middle
class vanishing; in the following sentence is the reason. Once we had a society
and now we have an economy. They are not the same thing and they reveal and
signify different priorities: a society needs real engineers but an ‘economy’
spawns that strange, dangerous and nerdish breed of ‘Financial Engineers’.
Real engineers move mountains; financial engineers move money from Column A
to Column B at the speed of light.
Of course I may be wrong. There may be genuine need for a person looking to
do a Master of Financial Engineering Program that advertises its wares with
the following blurb;
“You know how numbers work. Now apply them. Use your quantitative skills
to help solve the complex and creative challenges of today’s financial markets.
Let us show you how. Graduates are equipped for careers in risk management,
investment banking, money management, derivative pricing, private equity, hedge
funds, and in technical operational areas of corporate finance.”
It might be easier and more ethical, though undoubtedly less profitable, to
become a Satanist.